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April 30, 2005
A must read - Fighting the madness
A Remedy for the Meth Epidemic
By Dianne Feinstein and Jim Talent
washingtonpost.com
Saturday, April 30, 2005; A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/29/AR2005042901368.html
more......The fight against methamphetamines received a major boost recently when four of the United States' largest food and drug retailers decided to put certain cold medicines behind the pharmacy counter.
We applaud the recent moves by Target, Wal-Mart, Albertson's, Longs Drugs and Rite Aid to make medicines containing pseudoephedrine less accessible. But they will not by themselves shut down the thousands of meth labs that have sprung up across the country. That's why it is critical that all retailers be required to limit access to cold medicines containing this ingredient.
Why is this so important? Because pseudoephedrine -- the active ingredient in most cold medicines -- is being used to brew up batches of meth in basements, cars and motel rooms across the country. The fact that it's relatively easy to make meth is one of the reasons the drug has migrated from California and the West to the rest of the nation.
Meth is cheap, accessible and potent. It can be purchased for as little as $20 a dose. Its effects on users range from the bizarre to the homicidal. And cooking meth is often as simple as a trip to the local store.
Those seeking to make it have up to this point been free to purchase all the pseudoephedrine they need, easily and without scrutiny. One of our staff members recently went to a local grocery store to purchase a large quantity of cold medicine for use in a news conference. He bought 27 boxes of cold medicine, and no one batted an eye.
This scene is being repeated in communities throughout the United States. Meth cooks will buy out a store's supply of cold medicine. They will go from store to store to store and buy as much of it as they can afford. Then they go home, extract the pseudoephedrine, mix it with battery acid and other poisons, and cook up a batch of meth for sale or for their personal use.
So what can we do to solve this problem?
The answer is clear: Follow the Oklahoma model. Oklahoma last year passed legislation requiring that cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine be moved behind the pharmacy counter. The result: an 80 percent drop in the number of meth labs seized. This law works. We should copy it.
Twelve states have done just that. Tennessee and Iowa, for example, have passed new laws in the past few months mandating that cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine be put behind the counter. Another 30 states are considering similar legislation.
But new state laws and the voluntary actions of retailers are not enough. That's why we're working together to make the Oklahoma law national. Our legislation would:
- Move cold medicine containing pseudoephedrine behind the counter.
- Limit the amount one person can buy to 9 grams a month -- that's the equivalent of 300 30-milligram pills.
- Require purchasers to show identification and to sign for cold medication.
These are not overly burdensome provisions. Anyone who legitimately wants cold medicine will be able to buy more than enough to meet his or her needs. But it will put up barriers to stop meth cooks. It will deter them from making large quantities of meth. And it will increase their risk of being caught by the authorities.
Will this completely stop meth? The answer is, unfortunately, no. Those who seek to use meth will undoubtedly find ways to continue to acquire the drug. But it will shut down many of the labs operating across the nation, potentially increasing the street price for meth and allowing law enforcement to focus on other aspects of the problem.
There is no question that this nation needs a far-reaching strategy on meth. We need to reduce demand for this drug by educating Americans about its dangers. We need to find ways to break meth addiction. And we need more funding for enforcement and prosecution, especially in high-activity areas. But what has become clear is that a comprehensive effort to move cold medicine behind the counter must be an integral part of any effort to bring this epidemic under control.
Dianne Feinstein is a Democratic senator from California. Jim Talent is a Republican senator from Missouri. © 2005 The Washington Post Company
Posted by cystdog at 12:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 29, 2005
What I've been listening to lately......
LQ Radio and Podcasts :Open Talk... about Open Source
Internet Radio and podcast project by LinuxQuestions.org with discussion and interviews about Linux/GNU and Open Source.
Podcasting Gone Wild - The Revenge of the Bleep
Leo, Patrick, Kevin, Robert, Yoshi reprise their TSS roles in the as yet unnamed podcast..........
Posted by cystdog at 01:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Flickr gave me two Pro accounts - so what did I do with them?
Flickr recently rewarded it's early adopters, those who paid for Pro accounts prior to the Yahoo aquisition, with two free Pro accounts to give away. I was one of those folks, and I thought about who I should give these accounts to, and for at least one if them, it was a no brainer.
I regularly browse the Flickr photostreams of folks serving in Iraq, and I came across Nevadog, a Sgt. in the US Army stationed in Tikrit (living in one of Saddam's old palaces) whose blog I'd read semi-regularly, A Soldier's Thoughts, and noticed he only had a limited basic account, so I donated a Pro account to him. Probably the most rewarding feature of Flickr for me yet.
Reading his blog and take on things on the ground is refreshing from the spoonfed dribble we get here stateside. The guy is an Arabic translator, so I find the insights he conveys especially interesting. He's also a family man, and given he's on his second tour in Iraq (under stop-loss), he has an incredible attitude and faith in things. Nevadog represents the best of what being an American is all about. I hope he and all the others serving in Iraq return safely and return soon.
Posted by cystdog at 12:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Farewell RH 9...
This weekend I will be parting with my beloved Red Hat 9 to embrace CentOS 4. I've been using the Prodigy service to patch RH 9 since 05/04, but the availability of that support offering is now in doubt.
CentOS is a RHEL clone, and with YUM, I'll be able to upgrade RH 9.
The Yum upgrade (from CentOS Forums)..........
HOWTO: yum upgrade to CentOS 4.0
A method of upgrading from RH/Fedora/whatever to CentOS 4.0 with yum:
Substitute your choice of mirror sites
(install GPG key)
rpm --import http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/centos/4.0/os/i386/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-4
(need these 3 files)
wget http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/centos/4.0/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/centos-release-4-0.1.i386.rpm
wget http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/centos/4.0/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/centos-yumconf-4-2.noarch.rpm
wget http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/centos/4.0/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/yum-2.2.0-1.centos4.2.noarch.rpm
(install)
rpm -Uvh --force centos-release-4-0.1.i386.rpm centos-yumconf-4-2.noarch.rpm yum-2.2.0-1.centos4.2.noarch.rpm
(upgrade)
yum upgrade
After the list of packages is displayed, choose 'y' to download and install.
If a new kernel was downloaded, then you might need to modify the grub.conf to set the 'default' entry to the new kernel. Kernel entries in the grub.conf are numbered starting with 0, not 1.
Reboot. That's it! You're done!
(Instructions modified from "Upgrading Red Hat Linux/Fedora Core with yum" @ www.brandonhutchinson.com)
As with RH 9, I'll have to add the NTFS driver, Linux-NTFS.
Posted by cystdog at 09:51 AM | Comments (0)
zdnet~Xen: a greater threat to Microsoft than Linux?
Xen: a greater threat to Microsoft than Linux? by ZDNet's Chris Jablonski -- I bet you recently have heard of Xen Source, a company that for the last month or so has been generating a lot of buzz for its open source-based virtual machine technology known as Xen. (See David Berlind's blog and Stephen Shankland's article). Gartner sets high expectations for Xen in a recent report (client reg. [...]
Posted by cystdog at 09:18 AM | Comments (0)
April 27, 2005
Breach
Breach
Originally uploaded by scupper.
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Fields of Gold
Fields of Gold
Originally uploaded by scupper.
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The Golden Trail
The Golden Trail
Originally uploaded by scupper.
Posted by cystdog at 05:57 PM | TrackBack
April 09, 2005
Davis...You are surrounded
County pressured to build
By Elisabeth Sherwin/Enterprise staff writer
WOODLAND -Developers are proposing housing, commercial development and industrial uses on 4,297 acres of farmland in Yolo County in 13 applications pending before the county Planning Department, the Board of Supervisors learned this week.
Three of the applications are for subdivisions on 1,146 acres to the north, east and south of Davis - the Oeste Ranch subdivision west of Sutter Davis Hospital, the Mace-Covell Gateway Project north and east of the Mace Boulevard curve and El Macero Creek south of El Macero.
A building moratorium placed on Davis by the county will come to an end in June.
I think there will be suicides when they learn that a WallyWorld will go in on County land adjacent to the city. It will be a sight to behold, the council and county supervisor meetings that is. If the city is smart, it will wrestle a revenue sharing agreement out of the County of Yolo. If not, the taxpayers of Davis will end up subsidizing these outlying unincorporated developments. I guess this is one way to grow a city.
read on @ davisenterprise.com.....
Posted by cystdog at 01:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 08, 2005
"not done as good a job as Sam Walton did"
Bob Buchanan, a retail analyst with A. G. Edwards & Sons, was quoted extensively in this NY Times article, "Wal-Mart Is Going Upscale. Well, at Least a Little."
He nailed it when saying:
The new premium additions are "barking up the right tree," Mr. Buchanan said, "but it'll be awhile before they can re-establish merchandise creativity at 3,000 stores across America. In recent years, they have not done as good a job as Sam Walton did in identifying merchandise trends."
I think they've strayed from where Walton was headed, especially with Walmart folks making statements like this:
"We're looking to take advantage of who's coming in now," she said. "There's so many people we can serve today. That's our first initiative. Then we can figure out how to get the other half of the country."
Posted by cystdog at 11:53 AM | TrackBack
A Linux MapServer bundled distro based on CorelLinux
HostGIS Linux 2.3 - a Linux/GNU distribution specifically made for handling GIS information
Caught news of HostGIS on Mapping Hacks and plan on checking this out using VMWare. It's based on CoreLinux, PostGIS-enabled Postgres database, and is benchmarked on a Pentium 2.
From Host GIS:
HostGIS Linux is a Linux/GNU distribution specifically made for handling GIS information. HostGIS Linux saves hours or days of installing MapServer and its components, and will have you serving GIS maps in minutes. It includes:
Being a Linux, HostGIS Linux is of course completely open source and may be downloaded free of charge.
- All the usual amenities of a Linux distribution: compilers, Perl, etc.
- Apache webserver, with PHP
- MapServer, and MapScript for PHP, Perl, and Python
- PDFlib, with support built in to PHP, Perl, Python, and MapServer
- PostGIS-enabled Postgres database server
- MapServer Web Client (MWC) to display great interactive maps without designing any HTML or JavaScript
- Example apps already installed demonstrating WMS layers, PostGIS layers, and PHP/MapScript
Download and documentation links:
The current manual and technical details
The current example docs and manual, downloadable
A list of what was changed in each version
version 2.3, Feb 2005
version 1.0, Aug 2004
For other assistance, FAQs, and announcements, visit the Forum.
Posted by cystdog at 10:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Oops! Firefox JavaScript Engine Information Disclosure Vulnerability
Secunia - Advisories - Mozilla Firefox JavaScript Engine Information Disclosure Vulnerability
Secunia Advisory:
SA14820
Release Date:2005-04-04
Critical:
Moderately critical
Impact:
Exposure of system informationExposure of sensitive information
Where:
From remote
Solution Status:
Unpatched Software:
Mozilla Firefox 0.x
Mozilla Firefox 1.x
Select a product and view a complete list of all Patched/Unpatched Secunia advisories affecting it.
Description:
vulnerability has been discovered in Mozilla Firefox, which can be
exploited by malicious people to gain knowledge of potentially
sensitive information.
The vulnerability is caused due to an error in the JavaScript engine,
as a "lambda" replace exposes arbitrary amounts of heap memory after
the end of a JavaScript string.
Successful exploitation may disclose sensitive information in memory.
Secunia has constructed a test, which can be used to check if your browser is affected by this issue:
http://secunia.com/mozilla_products_arbitrary_memory_exposure_test/
The vulnerability has been confirmed in versions 1.0.1 and 1.0.2. Other versions may also be affected.
Solution:
Disable JavaScript support.
Provided and/or discovered by:
Azafran
Original Advisory:
Mozilla bug report:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=288688
Azafran:
http://cubic.xfo.org.ru/index.cgi?read=53004
Posted by cystdog at 09:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 04, 2005
GhettoSat - Croetto
Posted by cystdog at 06:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
